It has been a rather busy couple of weeks so I’m a little late to the party, but I thought I’d just chime in with a few thoughts regarding the recent debate over content and diversity at tech (mostly web) conferences. To provide a little context, Lanyrd is showing that since 2007 I’ve been involved with 59 conferences, online and ‘offline’, with roles ranging from tech production to full on event production. I’ve had the opportunity to help select topics and speakers as well as putting entire schedules together.

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Last August I was part of a 4-person expedition to the Russian Altai (see: thealtai.co.uk). Alpkit were kind enough to loan us one of their Zhota 3-person tents which we used as our basecamp / mess tent.

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In WordPress 3.5, the oEmbed media sizing option has been ‘helpfully’ removed from the Settings -> Media page. You may find, as I did, that media embedded in posts (such as SmugMug images) have taken on a new default size (500×333) and there’s no obvious way to fix this. A bit of a problem and rather annoying!

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Here’s the first batch of photos from my recent trip to the Altai mountains, Siberia, Russia. Four of us travelled out for a little under 3 weeks to explore the area, which sees very few Western visitors, and to see what the mountaineering was like. Lots more info (including a soon to be published expedition report) at: thealtai.co.uk

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I’m off to the Altai mountains in Russia (south Siberia) this week (have a look at the expedition site: thealtai.co.uk) and felt I needed to modify my camera strap setup to give me more flexibility and safety when climbing / moving over tricky terrain, especially having seen Alexandre Buisse’s unfortunate camera drop incident in the Alps. The Carry Speed sling looked like it was up to the job and also a reasonable price – $60 for the plate, ballhead connector, shoulder strap and wrist strap. (Updated post-trip review at the bottom)

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I’ve headed to Nice this Summer to spend a bit of time working as a part-time cycle guide for the lovely folk at Cycle Côte d’Azur. Normal web development work will continue during the rest of my free time and I’m hoping to also get into a bit of cycling photography (I’ve picked up some knowledge from being the one on the bike at some of Cycling Plus magazine’s shoots, time to put that into practice). Needless to say I’m looking to get some landscape shots of the rather stunning scenery around here as well!

Customising the Admin Interface

In part 1, I created a custom post type ‘Photos’ with a custom taxonomy of ‘Places’. I want to make managing my photo posts a little easier. This requires tweaking the default WP admin interface a little by adding in extra columns to populate with specific data relating to the photos such as places, thumbnails and a map of the locations.

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Displaying EXIF Data for a Photo

Under each photo in a listing or individual photo page, I’ll output a short list of relevant EXIF metadata (such as shutter speed, aperture and ISO) along with a link to a Google map showing the photo’s location.

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I spent a while wrangling WordPress (which I’m using to publish this site) so that it suited my workflow and needs as a photographer. I’m going to cover a few key areas that I customised over the next couple of blog posts.

I needed a straightforward way to:

• Manage the creation of photo posts within their own blog
• Add locations to photos / categorise them in a sensible way (using a ‘Places’ taxonomy)
• Have easily understandable ‘pretty’ URLs for posts: /photos/from/place-name/post-name
• Add custom photo posts & thumbnails to the RSS feed
• Have custom shortlinks for each post
• Display photo meta data such as EXIF and GPS (part 2)
• Customise the WordPress admin for my needs (part 3)

This first part will cover the creation of the custom post type and its taxonomy, along with outputting these new post types and the data associated with the photos.

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Disappointment is a strange thing – we spend our lives going out of our way to avoid it. Yet, whenever I look back at disappointments in life, they almost always result in something unexpected and often considerably more positive.

I think a key contributor to steering clear of potentially disappointing situations is that we spend so much time considering and planning for the future, wondering about how it’ll turn out, and with this comes a certain degree of expectation. When expectations aren’t met, disappointment occurs.

For me, a recent photography-based (and yes, relatively minor!) disappointment occurred just a couple of weeks ago whilst on a shoot in Yangshuo, China.

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